LinieBaru: Chapter 28: LinieBaru VS Clone: One Last Time, Subaru-Kun (Patreon)

Subaru stepped through the archway with the spear held low, and the clone reacted instantly, closing the distance in a blur of grey motion, staff already whipping upward with a beam gathering at its tip before Subaru had even finished her second stride.

She threw herself sideways and up, flying hard along the edge of the chamber, weaving between pillars with the spear held tight against her body to keep it from catching on the stone. The beam tore past her shoulder close enough that she felt the heat scrape along her skin, and she banked sharply into a curve, using the momentum to swing herself around a broken pillar and come back at the clone from an angle it hadn't expected.

The clone tracked her anyway, its aim adjusting with that same relentless precision she'd grown to hate over eighteen loops, but this time Subaru wasn't running blind. She'd spent enough deaths studying the rhythm of those beams to know exactly how long it took the clone to recharge between shots, and she used that fraction of a second to dive low, skimming just above the marble floor before rocketing back upward directly toward her target.

Another beam fired, and she twisted her whole body midair, feeling the edge of it graze past her ribs as she rolled through the gap it left behind. The pain barely registered anymore. She was too focused, too locked onto the single goal burning through her exhausted mind, close the distance, land one clean strike, see if this spear could actually do what nothing else had managed.

She closed in fast, spear leading, and the clone's staff came up again, mana gathering rapidly for another shot at point blank range. Instead, at the last possible instant, it shifted, staff angling sideways, and a shimmering wall of pale mana bloomed into existence directly between them, the same shield that had swallowed every single attack Subaru had thrown at it across eighteen failed attempts.

Subaru didn't slow down.

She drove the spear forward with everything she had left, her whole body committed to the strike, and the blade met the shield with a sound like glass tearing rather than shattering, a high thin shriek that echoed through the chamber. For half a heartbeat, nothing seemed to happen.

Then the shield split open.

It parted around the spear's edge like the barrier had never actually been solid to begin with, cutting cleanly through layer after layer of dense, glowing mana, the resistance falling away so smoothly that Subaru nearly stumbled forward from the sudden lack of it. The shield that had swallowed grenades, bullets, blades, and every borrowed weapon she'd summoned across nearly two dozen deaths simply gave way, split down the middle like butter under a hot knife.

The clone's expression shifted for the first time since Subaru had encountered it. Not fear, not exactly, but something close to startle flickered across that calm, clay colored face, its head tilting slightly as if trying to process information that didn't fit whatever pattern it had been running on.

Subaru didn't give it time to process anything further.

She followed through with the same motion, spear continuing its arc, and the blade caught the clone across the throat. The strike landed with brutal, clean force, cutting deep, nearly severing the head entirely, and a spray of dark mana burst outward from the wound, splattering across the nearest pillar in ragged streaks.

For one wild, triumphant second, Subaru grinned, a mad, exhausted grin that felt like it belonged to someone who had just clawed their way out of a very long, very dark hole.

"Got you," she gasped.

Then the world tilted violently sideways.

She felt it before she understood it, an invisible force slamming into her chest with the weight of a falling building, and her body was ripped backward through the air so fast the chamber blurred into streaks of grey and gold. She hit the far wall hard enough that the stone cracked around her in spidering lines, fissures racing outward from the point of impact like frost spreading across glass, and every bit of breath in her lungs vanished in a single brutal exhale.

Subaru hung there for a moment, pinned against the wall by nothing she could see, her body screaming in protest, ribs aching with a pain sharp enough to make her vision swim.

What was that?

She looked around wildly, searching for the source, some spell circle, some visible thread of magic, anything that might explain the force currently crushing her against solid stone. There was nothing. No glow, no shimmer, no telltale sign of a spell being cast at all. Just empty air between her and the clone, and the clone itself, hovering exactly where it had been, staff held loosely at its side, not even raised.

Its head had already reattached, the wound at its throat sealing itself shut with disturbing speed, and it stared at her now with the same dead, unreadable calm it had worn from the very beginning, as if slicing its throat open had barely registered as an inconvenience.

No visible spell. No staff raised. No incantation, no gesture, nothing at all to mark the casting of whatever was currently pinning her helplessly against a cracking wall with enough force to make her bones grind against each other.

Telekinesis, Subaru realized, the thought arriving cold and slow through the haze of pain. It had to be telekinesis. Raw, invisible, brute mana applied directly through will alone.

Without a staff. Without a single word spoken. Without any of the usual trappings mages relied on to focus and shape their power. And with enough force behind it to crack solid marble like it was little more than dry clay.

"W-what," Subaru managed, her voice barely more than a rasp, blood trickling from the corner of her mouth where the impact had split something inside her. "What kind of m-monster are you..."

The clone drifted closer, unhurried, its dead calm eyes never leaving her face.

"Frieren—"

The pressure increased.

Subaru felt her ribs give first, a sickening series of cracks that stole whatever remained of her breath, followed almost instantly by the rest of her body folding inward under a force too vast and too absolute to resist. The wall behind her fractured further, chunks of stone crumbling loose around the edges of the impact, and for one final, agonizing instant, she was aware of everything at once, the pain, the pressure, the cold certainty of what was about to happen.

Then her body simply gave out beneath the weight of it, crushed flat against unyielding stone, and the world went dark before she even had the chance to scream.

───✧───

The world snapped back into being with a violent gasp, and Subaru found herself standing in the exact same spot in the passageway, hand hovering near the lamp, chest heaving like she'd just run a marathon instead of dying for the twentieth time in a row.

"This is impossible," she screamed, the sound cracking against the stone walls and rebounding back at her from every direction. "This is so unfair!"

She dropped to the ground, knees hitting stone hard enough to bruise, and grabbed fistfuls of her own hair, yanking at it like the pain might somehow ground her back into a reality that made sense.

"Why does this always happen to me? Why is it always me? I didn't ask for any of this! I didn't ask to get isekai'd, I didn't ask for some stupid death loop power, I didn't ask to fight an unkillable murder doll with a dead elf's face!"

Her voice climbed higher with every sentence, raw and ragged, echoing down the narrow passage in a way that made it sound like there were several of her screaming instead of just one. She rocked back and forth, tears streaking down her face, mixing with the grime and dried blood that clung to her skin from twenty different violent deaths.

"I hate this power," she wailed, her voice cracking on the last word. "I hate it, I hate it, I hate returning by death, I hate waking up over and over just to get crushed and burned and dissolved again and again like some kind of cursed toy nobody wants to throw away. And whoever summoned me here, whoever thought it was a good idea to yank me out of my own life and dump me into this nightmare, I hope they choke on a fishbone. I hope their favorite mug breaks. I hope every single sock they own loses its pair in the wash forever."

She dragged both hands down her face, smearing tears and dirt together, and let out a long, shuddering breath that did absolutely nothing to calm the storm raging behind her ribs.

"I can't beat that thing," she said, quieter now, talking mostly to the walls since there was nobody else around to listen. "Not with knives, not with guns, not with a magic spear that actually worked for about three whole seconds before she just, just crushed me like a bug with her mind. I need something big. Something stupid big. Something so ridiculous it shouldn't even be allowed to exist."

Footsteps.

Subaru's head snapped up, heart lurching painfully in her chest.

"Übel?" she called out, voice hopeful despite everything, half rising to her feet.

A shadow stretched across the passage wall ahead of her, long and distorted in the dim light, and Subaru's stomach dropped through the floor the instant she recognized the shape of it. Not Übel. Never Übel.

The clone stepped into view at the far end of the corridor, drawn in, Subaru realized with dawning horror, by her own screaming. It had heard her. Of course it had heard her. She'd been shrieking loud enough to wake the dead in a place literally called a tomb, and now the one thing capable of ending her over and over had come strolling calmly down the hallway to investigate.

"Oh no," Subaru whispered.

The staff rose. A beam formed at its tip, and there was no time left to run, no time left to think, no time left for anything except the brief, blinding flash of mana tearing straight through her chest.

She died again.

Subaru gasped back into the passageway, hand still hovering by the lamp, and this time she clamped both hands over her own mouth before a single sound could escape. Her eyes were wide, wild, staring at nothing, and beneath her palms her breath came fast and shallow, threatening to spiral back into screaming if she let it.

She couldn't scream again. Screaming got her killed. Screaming brought that thing straight to her door, and dying from pure carelessness felt somehow worse than dying in an actual fight.

So instead, muffled behind her own trembling hands, she started to hum.

It was a children's song, which had stuck permanently somewhere in the back of her skull from a childhood that felt impossibly far away now, a cheerful little tune about a round blue robot cat and all his wonderful gadgets. She hummed it low and unsteady at first, her voice cracking behind her palms, but the familiar melody gave her something to hold onto, something small and normal in the middle of a nightmare that refused to let her go.

Konna koto ii na dekitara ii na

Anna yume konna yume ippai arukedo

Minna, minna, minna kanaete kureru

Fushigina pokke de kanaete kureru

Sora wo jiyuu ni tobitai na

"Hai! Takekoputaa"

An-an-an totte mo daisuki Doraemon

She rocked gently where she sat, humming that same bouncy tune over and over, and somewhere underneath the melody, something in her chest kept twisting tighter and tighter, laughter and grief tangled together so thoroughly that she couldn't tell anymore which one was winning.

Slowly, she reached both hands out in front of her and began gathering mana into her palms.

This was it. If knives failed. If guns failed. If a spear capable of splitting magic itself couldn't finish the job. Then there was another option in her arsenal, one weapon so absurdly powerful that summoning it felt less like a tactical choice and more like an act of pure desperation.

What if this ended her misery for good, one way or another.

The mana built between her palms in a dense, swirling knot, humming faintly with a pressure that made the air around her feel thin and electric. She kept humming that same children's song under her breath, louder now, the melody bleeding into something unhinged around the edges, her lips twitching between the tune and a laugh that threatened to break loose entirely.

Shi yuku daitouban shiken ni otsukai,

Anna koto konna koto taihen dakedo.

Minna, minna, minna tasukete kureru,

Benrina dou gude tasukete kureru

Omocha no e itai da.

"Sore! Totsugeki"

An-an-an totte mo daisuki Doraemon.

She pushed herself up onto shaking legs and began walking toward the hall, though walking was generous. Her body swayed, weighed down by the sheer strain of the power gathering in her hands, and by the time she reached the archway she was crawling more than walking, dragging herself forward on hands and knees across cold stone, the swirling mass of energy in her palms growing heavier and denser with every passing second.

Her face strained under the effort, teeth gritted, blood streaming down her eyes, and still she hummed, the melody wobbling wildly now as she fought to keep herself from either sobbing or laughing outright. Maybe both. Probably both.

She dragged herself out into the open chamber, the clone already turning toward her, staff rising in that same calm, mechanical rhythm it always followed. Subaru barely registered it anymore. Her entire focus had narrowed down to the trembling mass of power cradled in her hands, the last hum of that childhood song dying on her lips as she finally reached her limit.

"Ea," she whispered.

And detonated it.

The chamber vanished in a wall of absolute white, a silence so total it felt like the entire world had simply forgotten how to make sound. There was no scream, no explosion she could hear, just an instant of total, overwhelming erasure that swept outward from her hands in every direction at once, consuming pillars, statues, marble floor, and the clone itself in one single unstoppable pulse.

Subaru had succeeded, in a sense. She had erased a great deal.

Including herself.

The blackness took her along with everything else, and somewhere on the other side of that nothing, she gasped back into existence in the passageway, hand hovering once again by the small brass lamp, its flame steady and untouched, patiently waiting for her to die yet again.

───✧───

Nearly a hundred loops now, and Subaru had stopped bothering to count the exact number somewhere around sixty, mostly because counting required a part of her brain that felt increasingly unavailable for use.

She'd tried digging through the wall at some point, scraping at the stone with her bare hands like an animal trying to claw its way out of a cage, fingernails splitting and bleeding against unyielding rock. It hadn't worked, obviously, but worse than that, the sound of her own frantic scratching had carried straight through the passageway and drawn the clone in every single time, arriving with that same patient, unhurried pace, staff already rising before Subaru could even scramble back to her feet.

She'd tried a rocket launcher next, dragging the massive weapon out of memory, some heavy artillery piece meant to punch through the hide of creatures the size of buildings. The shell hit the shield and simply stopped there, absorbed into nothing, the explosion swallowed whole without so much as rattling the air around it. She'd tried beam weapons after that, borrowing sleek armored cannons that fired searing lines of energy hot enough to melt steel, and those met the exact same fate, vanishing against that shimmering wall of mana like they'd never existed at all.

Nothing worked. Nothing had ever worked, not really, except for that one brief flicker of hope with the spear, and even that had ended in her spine getting crushed against a wall until her ribs punched through her own lungs. Somehow, impossibly, this thing with Frieren's stolen face just kept absorbing everything Subaru threw at it, kept crushing her, burning her, dissolving her, over and over, without a single crack ever showing in that perfect, unbothered calm.

She remembered Stark, way back on that very first day of this whole nightmare, the axe swinging down again and again while she screamed and begged and eventually just went numb to the pain of it. She'd thought that was the worst thing she'd ever experience. She'd thought nothing could possibly be scarier than watching an axe blade come down toward her throat in slow motion, knowing exactly what was about to happen and being powerless to stop it.

She'd been wrong. This was worse. Stark, at least, had been human under all that violence, predictable in his own brutal way, driven by something she could almost understand even if she hated it. This clone wasn't driven by anything. It didn't hate her. It didn't want anything from her. It simply existed to remove her from its space, the same way someone might swat away an insect without a single thought spared for the insect's feelings on the matter.

By the hundredth death, something in Subaru's chest had started to crack in a way that had nothing to do with her body.

She laughed.

It happened right as the beam tore through her stomach, right as her organs turned to ash and her legs gave out beneath her, and the sound that came out of her mouth wasn't quite a scream anymore. It was closer to laughter, high and broken and completely unhinged, bubbling up from somewhere she didn't recognize inside herself. The clone didn't react to it, of course. It never reacted to anything. It just watched with those same dead, calm eyes as Subaru collapsed into black mist, laughing the entire way down into nothing.

By the hundred and eleventh time, something inside her simply stopped fighting.

She gasped back into existence in the passageway, hand still hovering by the lamp, and instead of standing up, instead of gathering her thoughts, instead of trying to plan or scheme or summon one more desperate weapon from the endless well of fiction she carried around in her skull, she just started walking.

Straight into the hall.

No weapon in her hands. No plan in her head. Just her own two feet carrying her forward while something behind her eyes had gone glassy and distant, like she was watching this happen to someone else through a window rather than actually living through it herself.

The clone turned toward her the instant she crossed the threshold, staff already rising, and Subaru let out a giggle that sounded far too bright for the situation, far too cheerful for someone about to get vaporized for the hundred and eleventh time.

"Come on then," she said, spreading her arms wide, laughing harder now, the sound cracking at the edges into something closer to a sob dressed up in the shape of a laugh. "Come on, do your worst, I've basically got a season pass to this at this point."

The beam fired.

Subaru dropped and rolled on pure instinct, her body remembering the motion even though her mind had mostly checked out of the process, and she came up laughing, sprinting in a wide loop around a cracked pillar while another beam chased her heels, close enough to singe the back of her shirt.

"Missed me," she called out, voice cracking into something manic. "Try again, come on, you can do better than that!"

Another beam. She dove sideways, hit the ground hard, rolled back up onto unsteady legs and kept moving, weaving between fallen chunks of statue with a wild, reckless energy that had nothing left to do with strategy or survival instinct. She wasn't dodging to live anymore. She wasn't even sure what she was doing anymore, except that her body kept moving and her mouth kept laughing and somewhere far beneath the laughter, something raw and broken kept threatening to spill out instead.

A beam clipped her shoulder, and pain lanced through her arm hot and sharp, flesh sizzling where the mana had grazed her, and she staggered, laughing even as tears streamed freely down her face now, the two things tangled together so completely she couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.

"That's cute," she gasped, cradling her burned arm as she kept stumbling forward, dodging on pure reflex alone. "That's real cute, keep it up, really, I'm having the time of my life down here."

The clone advanced steadily, staff tracking her every move, beams firing in that same relentless rhythm it always kept, patient and merciless and utterly without pity. Subaru kept running, kept laughing, kept crying, her feet carrying her in wild loops around the chamber while her voice cracked between giggles and something closer to genuine, gutted sobbing.

A beam caught her leg and she went down hard, skidding across marble, blood smearing behind her in a long dark streak. She dragged herself back up anyway, laughing through gritted teeth, one leg dragging uselessly behind her now, and kept moving, because stopping felt somehow more frightening than the pain did.

"You know," she called out between ragged breaths, hobbling sideways as another beam scorched past her, "I used to think dying once would be, like, a big deal. Life flashing before your eyes, that whole thing. Turns out after the first fifty times it gets kind of boring. Who knew."

The clone said nothing, of course. It never said anything.

Another beam found her, this one catching her square in the back, and she pitched forward onto the marble floor, skin blistering and blackening where the mana had struck, and still she laughed, a broken, hollow sound that echoed strangely through the vast chamber.

"Boring," she repeated, dragging herself up onto her elbows despite the pain screaming through every nerve in her body. "So, so boring. You'd think an evil murder clone would come up with something new eventually. Mix it up a little. But no, same beams, same shield, over and over, like some kind of cursed rerun nobody asked for."

The clone drifted closer, staff rising for what would clearly be the finishing blow, and Subaru rolled onto her back, staring up at the distant ceiling, laughter finally fading into something quieter, something closer to exhaustion than amusement.

"Go on then," she whispered, no longer bothering to move, no longer bothering to fight. "Do it. I'll be back in a second anyway. We both know how this goes."

The final beam struck, and her body came apart in a spray of black mist and dark red blood, scattering across cracked marble that had already seen this exact scene play out more times than either of them could count.

She gasped back into the passageway, hand hovering by the lamp, and without pause, without hesitation, without even a flicker of the exhaustion that should have been crushing her by now, she simply started walking forward again, straight back into the hall, ready to do it all over one more time, because at this point, doing it over and over had somehow become easier than trying to stop.

───✧───

Somewhere in a void, a feminine silhouette opened her eyes, there were violet visible cracks in this space of white, purple smoke coming out of the cracks.

“One last time, Natsuki Subaru”

Next chapter: She had one shot left. Maybe not even one full shot, given how thin her mana reserves felt at this point, stretched out and trembling like a rope about to snap. But one shot was still one more chance than she'd had a hundred loops ago, and she wasn't about to waste it lying pinned against a wall feeling sorry for herself.

She pressed both hands together in front of her chest, forcing herself to breathe despite the crushing pressure still bearing down against her ribs, forcing her scattered, panicked thoughts into something resembling focus.

"Please work," she whispered, voice trembling, eyes squeezed shut for half a second as she gathered every last drop of power she had left.